1988, The upgrade of the NSFNET backbone to T1 completes and
the Internet starts to become more international with the
connection of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands,
New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet.
1989, Networks speed up. NSFNET T3 (45Mbps) nodes operate. At
Interop 100Mbps LAN technology, known as FDDI,
interoperates among several vendor

Most important for the Internet, NSF issues a request for
proposals to establish supercomputer centers that will
provide access to the entire U.S. research community, regardless
of discipline and location. A new division of Advanced Scientific
Computing is created with a budget of $200 million over five years.

1990 ARPANET formally shuts down. In twenty years, `the net' has
grown from 4 to over 300,000 hosts. Countries connecting in
1990 include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece,
India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland.
1991 The net's dramatic growth continues with NSF lifting any
restrictions on commercial use.
The NSFNET backbone upgrades to T3, or 44 Mbps.
Total traffic exceeds 1 trillion bytes, or 10 billion packets per
month! Over 100 countries are now connected with over
600,000 hosts and nearly 5,000 separate networks.
1992 During the summer, students at NCSA in Champagne-Urbana
modify Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext proposal. In a few
weeks MOSAIC is born within the campus. Larry Smarr shows
it to Jim Clark, who founds Netscape as a result.